The present invention relates to surgical devices and methods and, more particularly, to devices and methods for cutting surgical wire and cable.
It is a common requirement in orthopedic surgical procedures to anchor two or more elements together, such as pieces of a bone, two or more bones, or a combination of soft tissue and bone. This has been accomplished by a number of devices, such as bone bolts that penetrate two pieces of bone and use a nut to draw the segments together, bone screws and interconnecting plates, wires circling at least two pieces of bone, or sutures into the tissue. Often such devices require a relatively large access opening through surrounding and/or covering tissue to implant the anchoring devices. The enlarged access site may increase patient pain and lengthen recovery time. Further, in some locations it is difficult and impractical to make large access points to reach the appropriate site because of surrounding joints and vessels. Even with devices that penetrate the tissue in a substantially linear manner, i.e. lag bolts, the fracture must often be reduced before drilling and insertion of the bolt. Further, some of these devices may be difficult to use since it may be hard to reduce a fracture between two bone segments and maintain that reduction while the device is inserted. This is particularly true with small bone fragments were the use of threaded implants may tend to rotate one bone segment with respect to another, thereby creating a misalignment between the fragments.
One approach to solving this problem is the use of cerclage systems that provide an alternative to implants that must penetrate the bone to achieve fixation. These systems rely on passing a cable around two segments of bone and then tensioning the cable to squeeze the bone segments together.
Another approach to solving the problem of cable fixation is to provide a system of implants and instruments that allow an implant mounted on a flexible tension member to track through a hole drilled across the fracture, providing reduction and fixation of the fracture. The tension member may be implanted through bones as opposed to around them, as in a cerclage system. It may also be possible to use a monofilament wire, rather than a cable as the flexible tension member in the fixation system. In either event, there remains a need for a convenient and effective system for securing two segments of tissue together.